Washington, D.C., December 14: Front page stories
in The Washington Post ("New Spy Satellite Debated
on Hill," Dec. 11, 2004) and The New York Times
("New Spy Plan Said to Involve Satellite System," Dec.
12, 2004) describe a secret satellite program that the Senate
intelligence committee has voted to cancel but survives in the
current intelligence budget due to strong support from the House
and Senate appropriations committees and the House intelligence
committee.

Senator John D. Rockefeller, the vice chairman of the Senate
intelligence committee, said the program "is totally unjustified
and very wasteful and dangerous to national security." Rockefeller,
who said he had voted to terminate the program for two years but
was "overruled" by the appropriations committees, was
joined by three other Democratic senators in refusing to sign
a compromise worked out by Senate and House negotiators over future
U.S. intelligence programs.

Also published here are two additional documents that shed light
on this issue: a declassified National Reconnaissance memorandum
from 1963 on the possibility of creating a covert satellite system;
and a U.S. patent issued to Teledyne Industries in 1994 for a
"satellite signature suppression shield."

This memo addresses the possibility of creating a covert reconnaissance
satellite system. The objective would be to insure that the U.S.
would be able to continue to obtain high resolution photographs
of targets in the Soviet Union even if the Soviets even in the
face of "an intense Soviet effort" to reduce coverage.
The memo specifies the requirements for establishing a covert
system - requirements which include special provisions for security,
launch, recovery, as well "reduction of radar and optical
cross-sections below the detection threshold …"

This patent claims to provide a technique that could suppress
the laser, radar, visible, and infrared signatures of a satellite.
Providing a satellite with such stealth capabilities would "make
it difficult or impossible for hostile enemy forces to damage
or destroy satellites in orbit" - which is the purpose of
the invention. It is not public knowledge whether there is any
similarity between the techniques proposed in this patent and
the techniques employed to reduce the signatures of the MISTY
satellites.

U.S.
space reconnaissance systems were the primary means of collecting
intelligence on Iraq and Kuwait, particularly in the period before
military action began. Of particular importance were the imagery
satellites the United States had in operation. Three KH-11s were
in orbit, although the oldest, launched in 1984, had limited capability.

In
addition, there was a satellite, known by the numerical designation
3101 and the code name ONYX, that had been launched in December
1988. Earlier, it (or the program to produce it) had been known
as LACROSSE; and before that INDIGO. It was the program that nine
years earlier the OD&E had tried to kill by offering to put
a radar imagery capability on future versions of the KH-11. Rather
than passively depending on reflected visible light or heat to produce
imagery, ONYX, as QUILL had three decades earlier, relied on the
active radio pulses it generated and then received back from its
target. Unlike QUILL, its imagery was not stored in a capsule but
transmitted to a relay satellite and then back to the United States.
Although the resulting imagery was not in the same class as that
of the KH-11, with a resolution of three to five feet, ONYX did
have two major advantages. The KH-11 could not produce imagery in
the presence of significant cloud cover, which prevented light or
heat from reaching the spacecraft sensors, but ONYX could. And whereas
the KH-11's visible light sensors were of little value during darkness,
radar imagery systems worked well at night.

ONYX
had been developed and built by Martin Marietta under the supervision
of the Air Force Office of Special Projects, but there was another
imagery satellite in orbit--and that was an OD&E product. When
first launched from the space shuttle Atlantis on March 1, 1990,
it was believed to be the first advanced KH-11 spacecraft (the first
of which would be launched in 1992). Within weeks, both U.S. and
Soviet sources reported it had malfunctioned and would make a "fiery
reentry . . . in the next 30 days."

Both
assessments were wrong. The payload was a stealth imaging satellite
code-named MISTY, which had been developed under the supervision
of the DS&T's development and engineering office.

MISTY
was one of at least two satellites developed in exceptional secrecy
subsequent to the 1983 Reagan administration decision to establish
a stealth satellite program. (Note) The idea
for MISTY came from OD&E engineers, some of whom had been enamored
of the idea of a stealth satellite since the 1970s--having rediscovered
the concept first suggested in the 1960s. The objective was to reduce
the threat to U.S. satellites from the Soviet Union--whose antisatellite
program was of significant concern during the early 1980s.

To
help define that threat, OD&E turned to the Directorate of Intelligence's
Office of Scientific and Weapons Research (OSWR)--the office formed
in 1980 by the merger of the scientific and weapons intelligence
offices that had been transferred to the intelligence directorate
in 1976. A Threat Assessment Branch (later Center) in the OSWR Space
Systems Division was established and produced an analysis that supported
the idea that MISTY could be successful--it argued that Soviet radars
and cameras were not very capable and were unlikely to track the
satellite. But because the program was so highly compartmented,
OD&E did not consult several agencies that had experience in
satellite tracking--including the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL),
whose engineers might have provided a different assessment about
MISTY'S vulnerability to detection.

A clue
to possible U.S. government interest in stealth satellites was supplied
just weeks after MISTY'S launch. To the anger of many in the NRO,
a patent application was filed, apparently by the SDIO, for a "Satellite
Signature Suppression Shield." The application described an
inflatable shield that could protect satellites from detection by
radar, laser, infrared, and optical systems.

But
despite MISTY'S intended stealthiness, when the shuttle placed it
into orbit, four civilian space observers--Russell Eberst, Daniel
Karcher, and Pierre Neirinck in Europe and Ted Molczan in Canada--were
able to determine that the satellite was in a 494-by-503-mile, 65-degree
orbit, an orbit that did not match any other U.S. military spacecraft.
In addition, the civilian observers were able to monitor a series
of maneuvers performed by the satellite--including the "explosion"
that may have been a tactic to deceive those monitoring the satellite
or may have been the result of the jettisoning of operational debris.

The
satellite did finally disappear around November 1990. In 2000, one
space observer, examining orbital data from the North American Defense
Command, came to the conclusion that in May 1995, the satellite
was in a 451-by-461-mile orbit. Where the satellite is today is
unclear, as is how much additional intelligence MISTY has yielded.

Note:
The program was so secret that there was a special compartment,
designated ZIRCONIC, established within the already highly secret
BYEMAN Control System to designate information relating to stealth
satellites. Within ZIRCONIC, yet another term, NEBULA, designated
stealth satellite technology.